I finally loaded ArcGIS 9.4 beta2 and I must say it works much better. The install had a glitch with the new licensing format – something to do with the part that downloads the license directly to PC (different than before where you get a license file emailed to you and then you include it). …
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Main Board Regroup
I am starting to have problems with my underpowered x86 board I had already. I kind of hit a wall when going further on the integration of cam for vision processing. Even though the cam is recognized by USB port, the driver stack in Win2K does not handle the cam (I had tested it in …
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Pan-Tilt and Video Figured Out….
After much trial and error and success with PWM and the neck servos (Hitec), I found I was having problems getting the servos to work together using basic pulse width in the Arduino code. Each servo worked perfectly when singled out, but trying a pan-tilt at the same time caused servos slamming to the ends …
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Torso Box and Neck
I got the pan/tilt assembly from Servo City on Saturday. While the unbelievable Packers-Cardinals game was on, I messed with prepping the Styrene box I had for the robot torso. I drilled the holes and installed the STPC SBC towards the back, and the compact flash and power connector fit (wasn’t sure until I tried). …
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Back to ArcGIS 9.4
Now the holidays are over. I’ve got to get back to testing ArcGIS 9.4……. So far I have it up and running on a spare workstation with XP Pro. The interface has changed quite a bit from the familiar ArcMap we have been used to since 8.3! I think they (ESRI) have supposedly rewritten everything …
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Std Servo and Accelerometer Communication
Part of my steps to get the different parts to talk to each other is a basic action/reaction workflow. With all this tinkering, nothing ever works out of the box! I soldered header pins onto a 2-axis accelerometer (Sparkfun) and hooked up to my breadboard. I had two Hitec HS-81 servos for the neck of …
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Messing with the Microcontroller
Now that I got The STPC working with Win2K and Dot.Net 2.0 installed on it, I started on the other aspect of the project – microcontroller integration. My plan is to get the PC board [SIC] to do the heavy lifting and the microcontroller to do the nervous system (think sympathetic) stuff, minute-to-minute. The first …
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Single Board PC and Loading Dot Net
Well, it has taken over a week, but the microcontroller/single board computer finally has an OS on it. This has been an ordeal. I actually had Win 98 on it, but couldn’t get .net 2.0 installed. I even had a universal USB driver so it acted like Win2K+ OSs and recognized and loaded USB devices. …
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